Tips for Inclusive and Accessible Hiring and Recruiting
Strategies for recruiting
So you’re ready to hire more individuals with disabilities, but how do you find and attract this talent? Sea Change CoLab interviewed Kate Pepler, from the Tare Shop in Dartmouth, NS. The Tare Shop is a package-free coffee shop and bulk store. The Tare Shop aims to provide alternatives to over-packaged food, household, and personal items and reduce barriers to encourage more sustainable living. In this short video, Kate shares many practices her small business has implemented to accelerate accessibility.
Evaluate your current culture and systems
Equitable and inclusive hiring is not just about making more offers to people with disabilities. It’s about valuing the expertise and experience of employees with disabilities and supporting their professional growth through their entire journey at your organization. Start the dialogue:
- How would you describe your organization’s current culture for people with disabilities?
- How prepared are you to provide accommodations and support the retention and growth of employees with disabilities?
- How does building a more equitable hiring process for people with disabilities align with your organizational goals?
Use this dialogue to set clear goals for improving your hiring process. The Tare Shop made accessibility a priority, even though it took a bit of extra time to create an accessibility page on their website. On the page, they share the layout and accessibility features of the shop, including washrooms and lights and sound.
Washrooms: “Our public washrooms are gender-neutral, barrier free and do not require a key or code to use. Inside you will find a sharps container. There are change tables in the washrooms at both locations.”
Lights and sound: “While we do often get very busy at the shop (and it can get loud), weekday mornings tend to be a great time to come in for anyone who is sensitive to stimulation. In the early afternoons we tend to have fewer bodies in the space. All of our lights are on dimmers, and we are able to dim them on request.”
Offer comprehensive benefit packages and remote work options
While benefits and perks are often a key driver in job seekers’ choice of employer, for employees with disabilities, a comprehensive benefits package is often crucial to maintaining their physical and mental health care plans. The Tare Shop made benefits available to all staff, whether they are part-time or full-time. They also waived the three month probation period before benefits start, to ensure all employees have benefits the day they start work.
Build partnerships
The Tare Shop reaches out to community-based and disability-centred organizations when they are hiring. This ensures that people with disabilities are more likely to apply.
Revise your job descriptions and application questions
Creating inclusive job descriptions and application questions means considering what’s truly necessary for the job and describing what needs to be accomplished, rather than how it should be done. Do you employees need to be strong oral communicators, or do they just need to communicate effectively with others? Reframing can open the door for new talent. Make it explicit that you value the lived experience of people with disabilities, and other diverse candidates. In your application questions, provide an opportunity for individuals to voluntarily disclose a disability and make it clear that you provide accommodations.
Ensure your application is accessible
One of the biggest challenges for people with disabilities is where to access the job applications. Is the application accessible to screen readers, for example? If you’re promoting a job on social media, have you used accessibility features. All of the Tare Shop’s social media captions on their posts include image descriptions (either in the caption itself or in the “alt text” function) for anyone who uses assistive screen reader technology. Their hashtags are all written in camelCase* to ensure legibility.
*camelCase is the practice of writing phrases such that each word or abbreviation in the middle of the phrase begins with a capital letter. This improves the legibility of the hashtags and allows screen readers to recognize separate words. For example, a regular hashtag might read “#thetareshop” whereas a camelCase hashtag would be written as “#TheTareShop”.
The Tare Shop has experienced higher retention rates since implementing these inclusive practices. In Kate’s words, “Who would have thought that if you make your space nice to work at, people will stay longer.”